revolution_fr | The Last Nights of Ventôse

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The Last Nights of Ventôse

"Actually, they were almost the same age, with a difference of two years only, but never really realizing this fact. They both accepted Maxime as the older one with no doubt. Their mutual feelings were much stronger than normal friendship; it was simply love from both sides, in Camille's case with a huge amount of adoration. The condition for his own happiness was Maxime being close to him; an adult child tended to live in a constant exhausting rebelion against his own slave's dependence. Yet the feelings of the older one were probably even stronger, though they did not restrain his being. Maxime's love was 'at least strange', entirely protective, much more passionate than fraternal attachment, not even paternal, but typically maternal. A kind of love hard to bear, painful, monstrously deep, mindless to the point of absurd, full of nervous fear and insatiable tenderness - in the case of a man, of course, hidden extremly well. During the last months, he didn't have time - nor right - to ponder Camille, aching in his all body with a dumb pain he refused to even think about; for half a year Camille had been giving him one stroke after another, deliberately and knowingly hitting the weakest point each time. An incredibly strong attack of malaria, from which Maxime was pulling through with such a toil, was probably the result of this game. A love of this kind is ripped of any dignity so far that the more your darling one harasses you, the more loved he is."

Not mine, though I wouldn't mind it to be. This piece of fanfiction is almost a hundred years old, being a part of a novel by Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ostatnie noce ventôse'a / The Last Nights of Ventôse. Posted in this community because it's one of a very few places where the author's name is recognized, and I think she is worth it.

Translation by me.

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I've never claimed that people responsible for Terror, dictators and people using violence to control society (I do not say they were all the same, I simplify!) tended to spend their free time laughing madly in empty houses, were unable to truly love their children or like them in general, as well as admire nature or have feelings for animals.

Of course it was a common responsibility, I think no-one denies it nowadays. Later Robespierre became a scapegoat.

By the way, what was the name of Robespierre's dog? I remember he had one in Paris. Do you happen to remember what kind of a dog it was?

Of course you had not. But unfortunately the friendlessness, the isolation or the loneliness often appear as their characteristics, in spite of historical proofs. BTW, "people using violence to control society" - including the kings and the democratic politicians, indeed ;-)

Brount.

For example, Saint-Just is often shown as unable to get on well with anyone except for his "idol" Robespierre. In fact he had at least two very close friends and a wide circle of friends-allies.

Sorry, haven't seen the second question. Sounds to me it was a dane.

Would be great if loneliness could always be helped by being surrounded by a group of people, if you know what I mean, but no proofs on that, only speculations leading nowhere.
It appeared to me now how we turn actual people into mythical figures, projecting our personal experiences, fears and desires on them. Robespierre, the Unloved One. Desmoulins, the Loved One. Saint-Just, the Rebelious One, etc.(same thing with giving especially the first and the last one the etiquette of "cold bastards"). Historical people disappear.

And thanks :)

Well, exactly. As soon as I wrote it, the other level of loneliness came to my mind. But that would indeed be a completely different story.

Oh yes, the archetypisation is probably unavoidable, but still annoying.
I mean, if anyone wishes to argue that
1) Saint-Just was a cold bastard, he/she can still do that without claiming -erroneously- that he had no friends.
2) Robespierre was a cold bastard, he/she can still do that without claiming -lacking any support for such hypothesis- that Robespierre did never have sex.

What I find especially annoying is see young and old historians (or political journalists) being influenced by stereotypes they've got from pop-culture and that seem to have a life on their own, totally independent on any serious analysis of sources. That's not very professional.

I'm sorry for leaving your post unanswered for so long (I didn't feel well).

The action takes place during one night and a day after. To summarize, Robespierre wants to put Dantonists on trial, but hesitates because of Camille. Being seriously ill, he sends for him. Camille comes. They talk for a few hours. Camille promises to leave Danton, convinced that he was
used by him for personal reasons. In the morning, Robespierre waits for Camille's anti-Danton article, but nothing comes. Saint-Just presses: decide, you have to, either them or us all. Robespierre does. The end.

What will you NOT find in the book: sex of any kind, Camille/Lucile (he makes an interesting remark about her, realizing that if he would loose her, he would howl like a wolf for w couple of days, than remarry and forget), Saint-Just lusting after Robespierre (at least I don't see it)

What actually IS there: long talks, repressed and admitted feelings, one kiss, not badly written characters (even somewhat annoying Desmoulins), Robespierre aware of and accepting responsibility for all he did, is doing and will do, Saint-Just running without a thought to hold him and protect from falling on the floor which is exactly what Camille was afraid to do a few hours before

As for the historical-political inaccuracies, writing out fantasies and using history to express one's own ideas, I think it's a convention in historical fiction in general. Richard the Lionheart in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, evil manipulator Richelieu and pure, innocent Anne d'Autriche in Dumas' Les trois mousquetaires, noble, tormented and perfect Marie Antoinette in Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge etc. Not to mention literature on much lower level.

In my opinion, "little personal affairs", relevant to the plot or not, give literary characters human touch. But much depends on the writer. And if you think Przybyszewska is sexually obsessed, read her father's Requiem aeternam. First sentence - "At the beginning, there was lust" ("Na początku była chuć"; interesting topic of sexuality in modernistic literature, but that'd be another discussion). According to the analyst of her works, PhD Ewa Graczyk, despite the lack of personal contact until she was, as far as I remember, nineteen, she was fascinated with his works and influenced by them (though not entirely). She later married one of her father's followers, but I promised a few posts above to keep Freud out of that. And yes, in her letters she admits to live so deeply in the world of The Danton Case during writing that she saw the events from the play as if she was witnessing them. I don't want to speculate about her mental state (she was a drug addict, too, but it'd need a deeper research to clarify whether she was a such in that particular period of her life), but she was obviously deeply into what she was writing, especially when writing about Robespierre, with whom she was in love with. She writes, by the way, that the only character in The Danton Case she didn't like, was Camille Desmoulins. Which in my opinion gives her even more praise as an author, because no matter how many times I'd shake him myself, I think that he's a very well-written character and according to his biography that I read (the author, Stefan Meller, has rather a good opinion among Polish historians), not very far from historical Camille.

And having a good motivation is a base to learn a foreign language. I've learnt French to read Les Misérables...

It drives people crazy like me =o who don't need to be more than crazy. I wish i could go back and save them..=( i guess we have to speculate on these things.

I'd agree on "poorly written", as it is a matter of literary taste and personal limits of tolerance, but I'd hesitate before saying radically whether a historical character I've never known was characterised well or not. I might say, though, that I like/dislike the author's vision. But that's me.

If you meant something else, I'm sorry.

I am sure lucieandco did not mean the reference to sexual undertones in Przybyszewska (totally obvious, btw, in The Danton Affaire and Thermidor) or to "little personal affairs" as a criticism. After all, in the debate below the entry that precedes by two this one (http://community.livejournal.com/revolution_fr/95311.html), she said, and I agree with her, that "people on this community...aren't averse to the notion of their favourites sharing slightly more than an idea" ;-D In that debate, btw, Przybyszewska often appears as a positive example of a honest historical fiction writer (which does not have to mean she cannot invent things, of course she can, that's what still makes fiction different from history).

For "poorly written", I'd quote a completely different novel: Tanith Lee's Gods are Athirst. Besides plagiating the title to Anatole France, she writes badly enough for a non-native speaker to be immediately aware of it and appalled.

And what are his basic theses, before I find the book?

I wonder if a scholar, writer or journalist, no matter how willing, can ever run away from cultural stereotypes and become truly objective. Can we. But that'd be another debate.

The topic of Robespierre and sex-or-lack-thereof is both interesting and annoying, when used as an argument pro the "cold bastard" image. If he were, sorry to put it a bit vulgar, chasing everything female (or male, or both), it would also be probably used by his opponents as an argumant for the image mentioned. All is good to support the images people have in their heads.

Is it really THAT bad? Many people recommend it, I haven't read it, but hacve it on my search list.

If so, I misunderstood.

A question came to my mind: what exactly makes a good historical novel?

Well, I don't really recommend you to find the book and actually read it. It's awful. The basic theses?
Well, you can get an idea from this quote, for example:
Speaking of the noseblleds, Robespierre suffered from: "What was the nature of this blood? Remembering a tendency to be affected by tuberculosis in the family, we first thought of hemoptysis. But we would have other testimonies of this, because those suffering from tuberculosis don't spit blood only during night. So, would it be wounds caused by face scratching or bites? We'd rather say it was a psychosomatic sort of epistaxis [i.e. nosebleeding], with a strong sexual and feminine conotation(*)."
(translation to English is maelicia's)

No, but they should at least try and they have to expect criticism if they do not.
As for the second point: very true.

You can read parts of it and of other revie novels in estella's post on this site:
http://community.livejournal.com/revolution_fr/26839.html

And the footnote goes like that:
(*) Wilehm Fliess, The relations between the nose and the feminine genital organs (1897), Paris, 1977. Friend and correspondant of Freud, W. Fliess mentions the nosebleeds as true menstrual substitutions.

So, according to Artarit, Robespierre suffered from nosebleeds, because he wanted to menstruate.
I mean, WTF.

Too idiotic to take seriously. Though I'm a bit curious whether the author tried to connect this quasi-fulfilled desire for menstrual blood with number of death penalties during the Terror... I have a strange feeling that he did...

I can't say you are mistaken ;-)

Well, first of all, I'd like to make clear one thing. I am not nor intent to be a qualified arbiter of literary values. As for good or bad historical novels, I can only give a superficial opinion based on me liking it or not.

What I was speaking about especially in the other entry, but to some extend also here, is NOT AT ALL a differentiation between good and bad historical novel, but an idea of a honest approach to real people in any historical fiction, good or bad. I think writers of historical novels do have certain responsibility when writing historical fiction using real people (and, to some extend, real events).
I have already explained what I consider a more or less respectful approach in my answers in this thread: http://community.livejournal.com/revolution_fr/95311.html?thread=1136463#t1136463

In the cases that are apparently realistic (i.e. do not "warn" by their non-realistic form and, on the contrary, give signs of authenticity), but they use the real people as vehicles to express other kind of ideas that have nothing to do with those people and for that reason manipulate with ahistorical hints on, let's say, modern Poland, like Wajda does in his Danton, then I find it still legitimate and acceptable, as the literature has always been using the past like that, but I also see as totally legitimate to point to the ahistoricity and manipulation in the critique and especially if used in class or in a novel's introduction.

As for the writers who do believe that they are offering an interpretation "faithful in spirit" (though, of course, inventing dialogs and even some events and people), what a writer of "realistic" historical fiction should not do is what H.Mantel does: she ends up using her novel as a historical source when asked for her analysis/opinion on the real events and real people.

As for the historical novel just for fun, I think I have explained my opinion in sufficient detail in the debate below the entry mentioned above.

Yes, it is really that bad. I started reading it and put it aside after a third of it.

Thank you for replying - and apologies, in turn, for making you wait even longer (caught up in my own soap-operatisms for a bit).

I don't think Przybyszewska is sexually obsessed - she doesn't write pornography or anything close to it, and she always weaves those little romantic/erotic insinuations into the contexts of the plot (be it Desmoulins caught between Danton and Robespierre, Saint-Just smiling sadly to see Robespierre go to Desmoulins, or Billaud et al being jealous and afraid of Robespierre's power; all of these can be explained in completely 'unslashy' terms) - which, to me, makes it at once better and worse: the 'personal affairs' all run parallel to the political affairs, which makes the latter more vivid and graspable especially for readers/audiences who aren't well-versed in the historical details (this might be the human touch you speak of), but sometimes the emphasis is placed so that the personal side comes dangerously close to overshadowing the political one. That is where the problem begins or can begin, in my opinion, with the shift of emphasis: in presenting (to go, still, with the example at hand) the final split between Desmoulins and Robespierre in a scene so romantically/erotically charged, she supports - I don't think for a second that she meant to, nor that she even subconsciously believed that 'really the whole thing was all about love/sex', though, well, yes, there seems to be more of that in her interpretation than she acknowledges when discussing either the events or her plays in her letters - a take on the situation that reduces it to that, reduces the conflicts between the central figures to one located on that 'personal' plane. It's a matter of context (which was why I asked what the rest of the novel is like), as always; in the context of the entire play, the political components are (in my opinion) sufficiently (though no doubt questionably in their own right) represented. But there are, in my opinion, more 'personal' scenes/overtones than are a)historically sound and b)necessary for the human touch/vivid-making.
Tackling the play as a play I enjoy these and think they are applied in good measures at the right places in order to create, maintain, and (most effectively) not resolve a lot of tension that would otherwise not be there (except for those readers who are themselves passionately caught up in the history/politics). Tackling the play as a treatment of history, and therefore completely independent of its accomplishments in structuring, pacing, even characterisation (since her Robespierre, even if he is dismissed as a far-fetched interpretation by the historian, surely deserves some credit as a fascinating creation from the non-historically inclined reader - the same goes for a thousand figures immortalised in historically dubious shape by some play or other), I think the representation is potentially damaging at least to the uninitiated reader. I must add, though, that as an uneducated afficionada I cannot claim the faintest expertise in either field, nor back up my impression with any proper theories. I apologise if I am being overly fatuous!

The reason I pointed this out the way I did (and contrasted it with fanfiction, or with the Mantels, Lees, and many, many film makers of this world, who seem to have no concrete historical/political objective at all, but merely a taste for the 'playground' of the era and the 'characters' involved; the entire debate, I guess, boils down to whether or not one thinks that real life should be used for 'playing with' in a piece of fiction if there is nothing more to it than that) is that it seems to clash so with her self-proclaimed ambition to write, so to speak, the definite dramatisation of the events, one that isn't coloured by personal interest or taste (in this she also meant to counteract Büchner) - whereas what she wrote definitely is, both in her interpretation of, especially, Robespierre as a political thinker (his visionary monologue at the end of "Thermidor") and in the way she styles his aura, so to speak. (TBC)

(How much of that is owed to her being in love with him, how much to her identifying with him - as a genius unappreciated by lesser beings and destroyed by the hostile circumstances of a world not ready for him/her - both of which she was at least partly aware of doing, may never be known.)

"Les Misérables" is a good example of this (though a bad one in other points; Hugo includes quite a few 'pages of history' for which, in providing them as a contextualisation of his action, he implicitly claims accuracy, even though in writing a novel he is not sworn to any such thing): Hugo could have called his Enjolras Charles Jeanne and placed his barricade at Saint-Merri, but he doesn't, he takes a very real insurrection and in its context realistically sets up a fictional barricade, where the personal tragedies of his characters can play out against a background of greater affairs, with a fictional leader, whom he can depict as as many ideals incarnate as he likes - imagine he had given the whole radiantly beautiful charming/terrible angelically chaste firy/icy marble Spartan treatment to Jeanne! (Perhaps most notable in this context is that he doesn't give it to Saint-Just in his "93".) In my eyes, that would have done damage to the historical personnage, and unnecessarily so, since the adventures can be told, the same great points made through fictional characters. And that in turn applies a thousand times to fiction that doesn't want to make Great Points in the first place.
It's different again (as Sibylla said) in cases where the author makes it absolutely clear that they are primarily playing around - for instance, I would not even be tempted to take Naomi Novik's word on the Napoleonic Wars and thereby come to believe that Admiral Nelson survived Trafalgar, because it's clear that she's playing merry hell with history (and aware of it) from the fact that There Are Dragons! I could (in keeping with what I said above - I've probably contradicted myself five times over by now ;D) demand that she stay away from all real persons, but I do think it's different, since she actually creates a whole 'nother history that every reader can easily distinguish from the real one, as opposed to taking said real one and making changes so small/realistic there remains a temptation to believe it - or believe the author believes it.

There is a 'biographical study with selected letters' of S. P. in English that I have read by Daniel Gerould, who also edited the translation of the two plays, and Jadwiga Kosicka (the biography is short, but understandably so, but I wish there were more letters); going by that, she was a morphine addict from circa 1921 onwards until the end of her life, so all she produced while understanding herself as 'exclusively a writer' would have been created under the influence of the drug. Taking the longevity of her habit into account, I wouldn't 'blame' it for any oddities in her writing (that is to say, not to the extent of claiming that she would have turned out something altogether less idiosyncratic without it), nor for her mental state - the three forces (morphine addiction and destitution, mental imbalance, writing) all seem to have enabled one another.
I've not read any of her father's writings (another thing I always mean to do) so I can't compare them in style, but he seems to have been one of the most decisive influences in her life, artistically and otherwise; she spent some of her later years trying to 'improve' the flaws in his writing. As for leaving Freud out of it, her second Revolution-related play (after the first completed draft of "Thermidor"), "93", apparently (as I understand it, nothing has survived of this even in Polish?) centered around a young aristocrat who denounces her father in order to see his reaction ... yeah.

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The Last Nights of Ventôse

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